Idea You Can Steal 50: Burying the Records


A lawyer’s job is more than stirring speeches and courtroom theatrics. There are legal precedents to research and analyze, and briefs to carefully write which lay out your arguments before you ever get to present them verbally in court (if it ever gets that far). This story will focus on the more mundane adventures that make up a lawyer’s career.


Public records are just that — records available to the public. That said, the government doesn’t have to make accessing them easy.

Our main character is a recent law school graduate who just landed a research job at a local firm to earn some money while she prepares for the bar exam. Her boss tasks her with researching a particular case from 20 years ago that’s relevant to the one the firm’s currently working on. How does the local bureaucracy hinder her search for records about this 20-year-old case? Why does the government seem eager to bury all knowledge of it?

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